The find was entirely accidental, as is the case with many ogham stones, which have a habit of turning up during earthworks, embedded in field walls, or repurposed as building material long after their original meaning was forgotten.

Reading the inscription has proved more complicated than it might first appear. Lankford, writing in 1993, proposed two possible readings of the text, tentatively identifying the names as variants of ANM MAQQI-LASIR or MAQQI-LASIREON, followed by MAQQI BIRRACIAS, where ANM is an Old Irish formula meaning "name" or "inscription of", and MAQQI means "son of". A later interpretation simplified this to ANM MAQQI-LASIRE MAQQI BIRRAC, which would translate as the name or inscription of Mac-Laisre, son of Berrach. The difficulty is that some of the letters Lankford identified may in fact belong to an even earlier inscription cut into the same stone, meaning the surface has been used more than once and the two texts may have become entangled. Such palimpsests are rare but not unknown among ogham stones, and they raise intriguing questions about how and why a stone might be reused across generations. The stone is now held in the National Museum of Ireland, and has been examined as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses photogrammetry to produce detailed digital models of ogham inscriptions across Ireland and beyond.